by D. P. Watt
I found myself, soon enough, on the hills overlooking our small town, gazing out across the wide blue bay, and catching the sounds of people on the beach, enjoying the sea and the sand, content enough to be who they pretended to be.
At first I felt as though my walk had taken me away from myself, for what would a scholarly man be doing up here, near to the cliff-top church and the coastal path into the wilds.
Then behind me I heard voices. There was a procession coming from the church and heading for the gardens that cling to the hillside, offering shade and peace for those seeking contemplation and refuge from the bustle of the town below. Perhaps I had been drawn here to read, and to think—however, my little bag was nothing more than a prop, it contained no documents, or books, merely a flattened box of damp matches and a torn map of Venice.
Suddenly I was surrounded by well-dressed people, and heard a vibrant march being struck up from a small group of musicians. Then, in two lines, one either side of me, passed a parade of girls, from five or six years old, into their late teens, in white dresses that reflected the agonising sun with such glare that it was difficult to look at them for any length of time. They followed each other in these formal lines, their heads bowed, hands held at their front in a meek, almost servile, pose.
I turned and saw behind me a group of men in dark suits, between them a large litter, padded with purple velvet and strewn with white carnations. Upon it, in an ornate gold frame, was a poorly rendered oil painting of a man whose features were so unremarkable that I, at first, believed his face to be entirely blank. All I can recall is that he wore a small peaked cap and brass spectacles.
The procession had a sense of both mourning and celebration. The wealthy people that had first engulfed me seemed more as though they were out on an afternoon jaunt, or picnic. The girls, and the men carrying the litter, more like a funeral cortege.
I followed them.
Within a couple of minutes we had arrived at the hillside gardens and I saw rows of wooden seats arranged looking out across the ocean. There was a wooden platform and a lectern that was decorated in more garlands of carnations.
The girls had filled the first two rows of seats, and the litter had been placed facing out to the audience, who now began to mill about, finding seats.
Then a man came rushing through the crowd, spinning between people who jostled to speak to him. He was tall, and immensely fat, and he wobbled like a ball of soft lard, or a quivering boiled egg. He was clearly heading in my direction and so I stiffened a little and prepared myself to properly assume my role.
“Ah, Professor,” he gasped, engulfing my hand in his, which felt like a warm towel or heap of rising dough. “I’m so pleased you could make it here today. It is a privilege and an honour to meet you. I’m afraid we’re running a little late though and we need to press on with the ceremony and the speeches, so please, let me show you to your seat.”
He had been leading me through the crowd and trying his best to fend off inquisitive attempts to engage me in conversation—it was clear that everyone knew who I was meant to be, apart from me.
He took me to the podium, where I was seated beside him; some of the finest dressed, and clearly finest fed, among the crowd joined us there and as the rest of the gathering settled into their seats and began, once more, to feel the wall of heat, even beneath the shade of the tall trees that ringed this little oasis of greenery, clinging to the side of the dusty hill like an odd, bright toupee.
Tapping a fountain pen on the lectern, the eager man began his introduction to the proceedings. He warbled on about “wonderful gifts”, “generous provision”, “sad loss”, and “fine education”. His words cluttered around my head as I worked at becoming a “professor”—of what though? Perhaps it did not matter, as long as I maintained something passing for professor-like, I might endure the afternoon without being discovered.
It seemed that the picture, so proudly paraded by the group, was one António Arieugon, and painted by himself. He had died a very rich man—not from any skill he had at painting, from what I could see—and had bequeathed his estate to the trustees (sitting alongside me, I assumed) for the establishment of a fund to educate orphaned girls (those sitting humbly before us, I assumed). This day, each year, was given to celebrating his kind patronage and to reflect upon his great skill as an artist, with a lecture from a leading authority on the art of the period (this was my role, I suddenly realised).
The egg-like man turned to me and said, “And now, without further ado, let us welcome our guest speaker, Professor Ignatius Marceuil, for this year’s celebration of our great patron, António Arieugon, who will be giving his lecture on the early watercolours, from the period 1892-1902.”
So, today, my work was already assigned to me. I would have to see how best I might respond to its demand.
I rose, with the pomp and self-assurance I assumed to be the mark of learned men. I smiled and bowed, before taking my position at the lectern.
As every great orator knows it is not the content of one’s speech that matters, but the quality of its delivery. In this latter regard I was somewhat lacking, I must be honest. But, what could they expect, I had seized upon my being only moments before—they had not given me much chance for preparation; to fully absorb and refine the Professor’s mannerisms, his idioms, his love of fine cheeses and hatred of mackerel—and these details matter in an issue of this sort, I can assure you.
So I had to fall back upon my material, and herein I learnt a valuable lesson—know thy audience! It seems that my lecture on “The Erotic Life of the Cadaver”, the only one I am able to bring to mind quickly and debate at length, was not well suited to this assembly. And they were correct, for, upon reflection, I do not believe that Professor Merceuil would have been interested in such subjects, being, as I later determined, an expert Mineralogist, specialising in the gemstones of the Veldt.
The assembled crowd, eagerness dulled in the painful heat, no doubt took some time to fully comprehend the theme of my talk. They were too busy fussing with their fans, or angling their dainty parasols, or adjusting their new hats, to listen to me. I too was suffering, with salty sweat dripping beneath my false beard that teetered precariously on the river of my face. My shirt was sodden and even my thick tweeds now betrayed wide arcs of dampness beneath my arms and down my back. But I pressed on, and as they began to realise—and as the penitent girls began to giggle—and then stare in wide-eyed horror at my tales of frolicking abandonment that corpses engaged in nightly (taken from a little known French text of the 15th century by a blind monk of quite wide-ranging reading), the booing and shouting began. As their outrage increased so did the aggression, at first it was the usual—soft fruits and vegetables, which any large gathering seems to have readily to hand when expressing their displeasure, then, when I did not abate, attempting to turn them with some more lurid, and often downright putrescent, anecdotes (taken directly from my unacknowledged source), it became a volley of missiles, increasing in solidity, from shoes and handbags, hats and parasols, to bottles and rocks, until I finally had to run from the garlanded podium and flee down the hill, pursued by an angry mob.
I was ill-suited to any form of exercise, beyond a leisurely, but often quite lengthy, stroll about the town. I quickly tired, especially in the heat, and was soon tumbling down the steep slope amidst a cloud of dust.
They were upon me then and I have never had such a hiding. I did not realise that the mild-mannered do-gooders of this idyllic sanctuary against the modern world could be so cruel. I felt the sharp sting of the genteel ladies’ high-heels in my tender privates, and the well-polished Sunday shoes of the respectable gentlemen in my dry mouth. I could hear that the eager girls had formed a ring around the melee and were chanting nursery rhymes and singing bawdy folk songs, to which rhythms the adults seemed to time their blows, until the whole exercise became more akin to a country dance than a lynching.
Once they were satisfied that they had brought m
e to the brink of existence and that I had stared long enough, through my rapidly swelling eyes, at the terror of death, they moved on, applauding themselves and slapping each other on the shoulders in hearty congratulation at justice well-served. The girls fell meekly in line behind them, as they headed off to toast their good deeds in the local taverns, until the demons of greed and debauchery had overcome them all and they were safely back in their homes, plump on their hypocrisy. It had, despite the disappointment of the guest speaker, been a thoroughly good day—and one, they were certain, António Arieugon would have been delighted by.
I felt the chill of evening upon my bruised torso, battered limbs and bloodied face, and, at some point beyond midnight (I had heard the bells), I was resuscitated by the kindly licks of a passing donkey and was helped home by an old man who had passed beyond judgement of those he found in distress and merely responded with care and compassion on his return from gathering wood and olives on the highest hills.
That day I had become Professor Ignatius Marceuil, buffoon and charlatan. He would ponder the erudition of my beard.
The Day of Nothing
After a day spent contemplating the catalogue of my previous selves I saw that there were few hours remaining in which to achieve a credible mode of existence, so I grabbed whichever coat came to hand, from the rack, and took whichever umbrella jostled towards me in the stand, and slipped into whichever boots happened to be nearest to the door, and left the house, as clean a slate as I had been in years.
I resolved to wander the streets again, absorbing whomever I might chose, and doing whatever I might fancy by way of dwelling other than in myself.
Try as I might, affecting the poses and gaits of those I passed and followed, nothing took my interest, and, for a moment, I wondered if He might finally have worn me down, and that I would have to meet him again and admit defeat.
It was then that I noticed the streets begin to fill with weary miners returning from the pits far to the North of our town, black ghosts from the underworld.
And as they vanished into their little houses, that seemed to cram themselves between other dwellings, as though they had simply burrowed in like hermit crabs, other workers emerged from other toils and painted the town with other colours—all dusty and desiccated though, as though the world were disintegrating through labour; the leatherworkers with their brown, grimy layers; the millers and factory workers, white with flour and ingredients; the office clerks with their clothes coated in the dust of ledgers and books, their hands stained black with ink, their fingers red and raw with the scratch of nib and the grit of sand; the washerwomen with their arms as bright as fresh pink infants; and, among the bustle, like bright balloons, the pensioners, purple with an afternoon of wine and almonds.
I followed a woman from the abattoir, her smock a rainbow of reds and blacks, blues and greys—I had not thought blood could be so many hues. Her thick boots clattered across the cobbles like the cracks of bolt guns through my skull.
I followed her out onto the road that leads to the city, and as we journeyed the other workers gradually departed for the small hamlets and isolated farmhouses that interrupt the greens and brown of the hillsides.
I followed her to a ruined building—the danger house, we call it—where an unexploded bomb is said to lie beneath. At the crumbled doorway she turned to me and shook her head, and waved her hand, as though to say not to follow her, pointing away across the field beyond, chaotic with wild flowers and tall, strange grasses. And then she vanished and I was left with the savage wind and tumbled stones.
That day I had become nobody at all. I pulled my jacket from me, running into the field as a storm began. I stripped naked and screamed, and laughed, and danced; yelling inane gibberish to the dark skies in thanks to all of the mad gods for their insane and unfathomable creation. He would never know the truth of rain and the anonymity of mud.
Day Ten Thousand Three Hundred and Sixty Eight, or, One Friday in July
Sitting one morning outside a café, waiting for the sun to edge itself above the rooftops and fill the little square with its warmth, I was suddenly struck by a poetic line,
Sweet were the histories that never came to pass.
I thought it worth noting and took out my little book and dabbed my pencil upon my tongue before recording it in a swirling script that was unlike my usual miniature writing.
The waiter appeared to take my order and that was when that day’s identity was revealed to me.
I turned the page and wrote, in what I thought might be a faltering foreign awkwardness,
Eu sou Richard Reece, um poeta Inglês, sou mudo, e ter viajado neste continente a partir de Istambul para Inverness e de Lisboa para Lviv. Eu gostaria muito de um café e um copo de água gelada por favor.
He nodded and left.
I sat contemplating my line of verse. Richard would not be satisfied with it, I was certain; he was a troubled man, searching for some piece of himself on the broken roads of Europe, in the villages and cities he had sought love and found only rejection, in the fields and forests he had sought nature and found only slavery, and in the sunsets and sunrises he had sought beauty and found only an everlasting inferno.
His poem would be found elsewhere. I struck a line through his words,
Sweet were the histories that never came to pass.
I closed the book and ambled home, the angry shouts of the waiter fading in the distance.
I had become Richard Reece, poet and wanderer. He would envy the beauty of my words, but would never hear them.
The Night I Lost My Dreams
I had spent the day suffering one of those illnesses halfway between the festering doors of death and the boudoir draperies of hypochondria. The night was different though. At exactly 11pm I sprang from my bed, cast off my nightgown of despair, plucked off my nightcap of infection and fetched my treasured dreams.
I kept them in a cupboard underneath the staircase, in a tattered shoebox on a shelf above all of my cleaning utensils; mops, buckets, cloths and vinegar. No thief would look for my dreams there, and besides I kept a pot beside them filled with coins to lure them from it.
Every morning, before the cock crowed, I would extract my dreams from my head, before they could evaporate in the grimy toil of the day. It took some doing, I can assure you. It is rather like extracting a tooth oneself, using only toothpicks and a hammer. Hands are not best suited for the task but, sadly, it is all we have been gifted with. Reach as far into one’s mouth as you are able and then push upwards with two fingers, whilst holding the nostrils tightly closed with the other hand. From your ear will, with the right pressures applied to the right places, pop a small marble. This is your dream. Within, instead of the usual swirl of coloured glass, you will see a fluttering of forms and colours, that merge and play, materialising now into a figure and then into a sprinkling of glittering stars, like jewels. There is nothing to be gained from extracting one’s dreams, merely a token of their having existed. They do not aid the recall of each, nor give any means by which one might communicate their content to another. They are simply a souvenir of another place. A place where He can never dwell. Nightmares are best left simmering deep within the body, their extraction is painful, potentially lethal, and can cause agonising side-effects.
That night I took my box down to the harbour and sat with my dreams on one of the deserted jetties, our town’s fishing fleet having dwindled into virtual non-existence with the number of men lost to the endless wars that plague this continent. I wanted to gaze at their kaleidoscopic wonders in the moonlight, which animates them in a way that no other light can achieve.
Lost in my memories I did not hear the footsteps behind me, or perhaps they crept along the jetty as silent as shadows. But, suddenly, I felt hard boots in my back, shoving me, and my precious box, into the sea. A riot of laughs surged upwards as I plummeted into the waves.
My dreams fell about me, suspended for a moment in the water before they began to sink, ea
ch sparkling briefly, as though winking goodbye.
I could not swim and had to abandon my dreams in a flailing attempt to save myself. While I was not far out I had to struggle to drag myself towards the shore where my feet could gain some purchase on the sands. I stood there, panting and sodden, staring out at where my dreams now lay.
Perhaps one day a boy, diving for oysters, will find them, glinting amongst the empty shells and smooth pebbles, and spend the rest of his life attempting to unravel their secrets.
In the distance I heard the enduring laughter of my attackers. I laughed too, thinking myself lucky to be alive, but also thrilled that my dreams had entered into future lives, passing from inertia into possibility.
I would never hold my dreams again, they were the property of the fishes and the crabs now. My only solace was that He would never hold them either.
Tomorrow
That was when the great pandemic struck. It claimed twenty million Europeans, I had had chance to become so few of them. I lamented all the lost opportunities to be them—selfish, I know, their loved ones might miss them in other ways, but by tomorrow I had become addicted to becoming and a servant to other existences.
He called on me late, just as the wastes of tomorrow were being reported, and before the rioting began. Perhaps, and quite justly, He has been murdered on his way home—it is the least they might have done for me, in their wrath.
He brought a bunch of flowers, picked from the deserted motorway sidings, He said.
He brought a bottle of brandy, taken from the hand of an eager looter too inebriated on his other gains to notice, He said.
He brought a small vial of poison, his own concoction, guaranteed to take me away “in an instant” when the world became unbearable, He said.